


homesick, but unmoored

by sapphee



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Character Study, Chinese American, Diaspora Feels, cantonese
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-04
Updated: 2017-04-04
Packaged: 2018-10-14 17:22:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,172
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10541055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sapphee/pseuds/sapphee
Summary: When Chris is feeling homesick, he hides under his blankets, running his thumb over tattered old red envelopes. He can tell who gave which red envelope by touch.





	

**Author's Note:**

> i'm 1st-gen to be born in the US canto chinese american. chowder is 2nd-gen born in the US canto chinese american. i thought it'd be cool to project on him for a little bit. he'd probably be less connected to [canto] chinese culture than i am??? 
> 
> uploading some drabbles from my sideblog (omgcphee). please reblog [here](http://omgcphee.tumblr.com/post/155513407864/chowder-hc-diaspora-feels)!
> 
> warning for brief references to the deaths of chris' maternal and paternal grandfathers.

When Chris is feeling homesick, he hides under his blankets, running his thumb over tattered old red envelopes. He can tell who gave which red envelope by touch. 

The generic no-nonsense one with 福 (good luck, fortune) in gold and embossed on the front is from his dad. He has a cutesy one with a cartoon rat (Chinese zodiac animal for 1996, his birth year) on the front from his mom. He has a giant one that’s all gold, even the background so it technically isn’t even a red envelope, with 福 in a different shade of gold on the front, from his popo (Cantonese for maternal grandmother) and a thicker red one from his mama (Cantonese for paternal grandmother), and his grandfathers died in elementary school, so he doesn't have any from them. 

Sometimes when he’s really feeling homesick, he uses his phone light to look at the backs of the envelopes, which is where his parents and grandmothers have written messages—the ones from his parents are from his twelfth birthday, and the ones from his grandmothers are from Lunar New Year. 

He doesn’t have any with his grandfathers’ handwriting because their deaths in third and fifth grades were what made him start collecting/keeping all the red envelopes his family gives him because he wants to hold on to things with their handwriting. Because it’s easier to keep _I_ _love you_  close to his heart and away from his family, and to keep 我爱你 tucked away in his throat and away from his grandmothers, like this. 

It’s easier to collect these scraps of their physical presences in this world than to pick up the phone and say, _I'_ _m scared of losing you._ It’s easier to sign up for Chinese classes and cower in a corner when his grandmothers laugh at his inability to pick up the language quickly, when his parents approve of him learning Mandarin since it’s “good for business,” when even his parents, who grew up in the US, agree that he’s an oddity and perhaps even a disgrace, a (barely) Cantonese-speaking, second-generation Chinese American college student learning simplified Chinese, since his family’s from Hong Kong, which uses traditional (but Samwell only offers simplified!). 

He stops over the red envelopes from his parents longest, particularly his mom’s, since she was born here (his dad came to the US later on). This is the only time his parents ever write in Chinese to him, and he looks at how his dad pressed the pen hard enough on the envelope for the words to be carved in it. Then he compares it to his mom’s handwriting, which is slightly shaky, and looks more like Chris’—evidence that they both started learning Chinese later in life, though Chris’ handwriting is still much more wobbly than his mother's. His grandmothers’ Chinese characters are beautiful (mama’s especially—calligraphy is one of her hobbies), but indecipherable, because they were written by sure, experienced hands. Written quickly, so it looks like script, in a way. 

Three characters on all the envelopes are the same—his Chinese name. but he’s not far along enough in learning Chinese to recognize all of them. He recognizes his surname, and he knows what the other two are, in a detached, abstract kind of way, and he responds to that name when he hears it, but it’s not on any official records. His parents had forgotten to put down the Anglicized form of his Chinese name as his middle name when he was born, and they decided not to do it for his sister, either. because that way, no one could be jealous (Chris) or annoyed that they came off as foreign, relative to the other kids (his sister).

When he visited Hong Kong and mainland China the summer after fifth grade—when his family flew there to bring his yeye’s (Cantonese for paternal grandfather) and his gonggong’s (Cantonese for maternal grandfather) ashes for a brief visit to their hometown (Toisan), so his yeye and gonggong could “reunite” briefly with the family still living there, he remembered seeing his dad’s Chinese name on the paperwork they had to fill out, while he, his mom, and his sister only had their English names, and it was sort of a shocker for him, to feel… unmoored. His dad had a past, a life there; Chris has no such connection—no 'legitimacy' here without a legal Chinese name. 

That divide—feeling too American for Hong Kong/Toisan/Guangzhou—only grows the longer he’s there. His cousins find him and his sister strange because Chris and his sister don’t know how to greet relatives properly (they don’t know the proper titles). A cab driver laughs with his popo that Chris and his sister look like Chinese people but speak like white people. A storekeeper asks him if he’s lost when he’s looking around, and he says the only thing he knows in Cantonese (”Sorry, I don’t understand what you’re saying”); the storekeeper looks confused when Chris then says he’s American in response to her asking if he is Korean. 

Sometimes he can’t handle looking at the backs of those red envelopes because he’s frustrated that he can't read what they’re saying. Sometimes he’s angry that his family doesn’t see how he’s struggling to learn Chinese, because they see it as a duty (his grandmothers have never said it, but they believe he should know it because he is Chinese, even though he’s not—he’s Chinese _American_ ; His parents believe he should know it because they’re first-generation Chinese American and have immigrant parents and are saddled with so much diaspora child guilt that it got passed down to him and his sister via cultural osmosis). 

Sometimes he thinks about how he can’t make himself say what he wants, like _I miss you_  and _I want to go home_  and _Samwell is no place for me I think I made a mistake going so far away_  and _I wasn’t cut out for learning Chinese I'm sorry I’m such a disappointment_  and _I love you. I_ nstead, what comes out is _Say hi to everyone for me_ and _I can’t believe I’m saying this but I actually miss soup and rice._

But other times, he thinks about all the words that stay crammed inside his throat. _I love you and I love my friends but all of you treat me like I'm a child who exists for your entertainment/enjoyment/consumption_ and _I’ve never felt like I could be my own person at home_ and _I don’t feel like I can at Samwell either_ and _I just got an 88 on my latest Chinese test_ and _yes I did study—I just hadn’t known that_ 还 _had two meanings which is why I lost so many points_  and _yeah I know sorry I forgot what you taught me I'll try harder next time_.

Then he tucks the red envelopes back under his pillow and—

Wonders how he could’ve ever been homesick in the first place.


End file.
